Architects, you’ve been indoctrinated. Time to question what you thought you knew – Architect’s Journal

I studied architecture because my soft teenaged brain thought that buildings and infrastructure were the hardware that could enable utopia. I had already designed many worlds. The most detailed vision was for Woo-land, a post-work, post-family, post-gender dream where everyone has lots of spare time to have rich non-monogamous love lives and communally care for their shared buildings and shared children.

I masterplanned their towns and designed their round houses where they live in groups of 36 and enjoyed such pleasures as a bubble dancing room. I engineered the baby pits where the genderless communal baby-making and child-rearing take place, their electric woo-cars that run on a network of overhead wires, and the extraordinary scientific innovation that was the spherical mesh that contains the whole planet and is embedded with germ magnets so nobody ever gets sick.

Last night I dreamt I lived there and let me tell you the crash back to reality when I woke up was a harsh one. Sure, the germ magnet mesh smells a bit of techno-optimist geoengineering and baby-pits could use a rebrand but theres a lot thats worth re-examining, 25 years later: Woo-land Redux?

If the way were creating housing facilitates transfer of wealth from renters and local authorities to landlords and investors, is that a good thing?

At uni I learnt that architecture is the backdrop to life and that to think otherwise was to pursue dangerous social engineering. I learnt that architecture was beautiful for its neutrality; an armature for infinite possibilities to be swathed across again and again, like headlights in a long exposure photo, leaving barely a trace on a perfect and durable and pure architecture. Then, in practice, I learnt that architecture is about creating value. Value for society, value for clients, value for users, value for stakeholders, value for shareholders, value for developers, value for investors, value for landowners, value value value. The trick is to create as much value as possible and to get your cut.

A global financial meltdown, unprecedented pandemic, and mainstreamed awareness of climate and biodiversity collapse later, and Im learning something new again: that my childish dreams were maybe more ingenious than ingenuous. Now we live in a world that knows deep down that buildings and infrastructure are far from neutral but rather the hard limits preventing our reciprocal relationships with each other and with nature. And we know deep down that we dont create value, we amass value; like any sandcastle, just out of shot theres a rough hole scarred with finger-scrapes and footprints.

It was nice, in a way, for architecture to be off the hook for social responsibility but we need to find our way back. Its not enough to reassure ourselves: Were building housing, housing is a good right? Of course housing is a good thing but if the way were creating housing is to facilitate transfer of wealth from renters and local authorities (via housing benefit) to landlords and investors, then is that a good thing? If the way were creating housing is deepening our reliance on property as individual financial security and excusing the state from providing welfare, pensions, and social care, then is that a good thing?

We like to think were creating housing in such a way as to address affordability and environmental harm. Were not, but we could! As set out by Sophus Ermgassen et al in their recent A Home for all Within Planetary Boundaries, if we were, wed be designing policies, masterplans and technical solutions to retrofit and redistribute our spatial wealth of existing buildings to facilitate social and environmental justice.

An architectural education, in uni and in practice, is a wonderful thing, but its also an indoctrination into a status quo that must be questioned. What if we all took a little nostalgic trip back to our sincerely nave imaginations and mined them for wisdom and something to fight for? Bubble dancing rooms for all? Maybe!

Smith Mordak is director of sustainability and physics at Buro Happold

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Architects, you've been indoctrinated. Time to question what you thought you knew - Architect's Journal